Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.

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_bent 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What Blender achieved is that lots of university programmes have started teaching Blender or becoming 'tool agnostic'. Studios have also started diversifying their pipelines (this coincidences with studios adopting Unreal and increasing usage of Houdini).

So while Maya is currently the standard, I don't believe that it's growing. It'll probably be around still in 20 years, with lots of studios having built their pipelines and tooling around it, with lots of people being trained in it, and because it's at the moment still better than Blender in some aspects like rigging and animation (afaik).

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underscoremark 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Blender is the go-to for struggling artists/developers, and industry outsiders, like me. I'm stuck at Blender 2.93.18 because I don't have the budget for better hardware, let alone a Maya license! However, even that version of Blender still gets it done for me.

And also, how can you say Blender is not battle-proven? I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux isn't battle proven.

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manifoldgeo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The studio that makes Evangelion moved from 3DS Max to Blender as their primary 3D software according to this article:

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-k...

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MichaelEstes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is not a very big studio or very big production, Blender falls over in the pipeline department. It’s a constantly changing API that doesn’t allow for the extensibility needed to get a major project out the door, just the fact that only a Python API is provided is enough for most people who have worked on massive scenes with massive amounts of data to consider it a non starter.

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wlesieutre 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm sure "major project" is a subjective label, but Flow made headlines earlier this year with an Academy Award (Best Animated Feature) and Golden Globe (Best Animated Feature Film)

https://flow.movie/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZccxuj2RY

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-intervie...

	▲	jsheard 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Flow is good filmmaking expressed through low-tech production, which is totally valid, but it doing a lot with a little isn't going to stop Disney from one-upping themselves with the next Zootopia movie so Blender needs to handle that angle too if it's going to become a catch-all solution for all kinds of production.

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_bent 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not disagreeing that usage in large productions is something that Blender isn't really designed for, but I don't think that it's for a lack of Python API features (if a studio wants something specific it could just maintain an internal fork) or the ever changing Python API surface (the versions aren't upgraded during a production anyways)

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mixmastamyk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

VFX studios have been using Python APIs for twenty+ years, backed by C. They were one of the first industries to use it. That's where I learned it, around the turn of the century.

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adamhartenz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The fact you can point out specific examples of when Blender is used says a lot. It tells me it is the exception.

	▲	frontfor 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed. You haven’t really won until it stops becoming noteworthy and “oh look X is using Blender!!” Nobody talks about how Linux dominates the server space anymore. Nobody talks about how “git is winning” or getting “battle tested”. These are mundane and banal facts. I don’t believe the same has happened to Blender yet.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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